Burn (Michael Bennett 7) (11 page)

I then did what every New Yorker does when confronted with a buzzer system and a locked lobby door of a building to which they need access. With both hands fluttering like Liberace playing a solo, I rang every button in the box.

“Who is it?” said a woman’s rough voice after thirty seconds.

Doyle rolled his eyes. The woman sounded almost exactly like the “Do your paperwork” lady, Roz, from
Monsters, Inc
.

“NYPD,” Doyle said. “Open the door, please.”

“Yeah, and I’m Hillary Clinton, you jerk,” replied “Roz,” then added, “You kids get outta here before I call the cops. And stop pissin’ in the elevator! What are ya? Dogs? Go piss in the park, you filthy animals.”

“I want to shoot this thing. Can I, please? Just once?” Doyle said, pounding on some more buttons.

Fortunately, before he could take out his service weapon, the door’s buzzer went off, and we went up the stairs to Chast’s apartment door. After knocking on it pretty hard for a few minutes, I started getting worried. If Chast was sick or hungover, she would have woken up. If she was in there, she was in trouble. I truly hoped she wasn’t.

CHAPTER
28

I SENT DOYLE DOWN
to the basement to see if he could find the building’s super. He came back up five minutes later with the super’s wife, an attractive fiftyish redheaded woman in flannel pajamas, named Meg Hambrecht.

“I knew it,” she said, fumbling with a huge set of keys at Chast’s door. “Every time my husband goes on jury duty something like this happens.”

“You hear anything out of the ordinary in the building last night, Ms. Hambrecht?” I said.

“Not a thing,” she said, finally spilling the keys into my hands. “Here. I’m useless. You try.”

The second key I tried worked. Doyle and I looked at each other nervously as I swung the door open into the dead-silent apartment.

Dear God
, I prayed silently.
Please let Chast not be here
.

“Could you wait out here, Ms. Hambrecht?” I said.

“With pleasure,” she said.

“Hey, Naomi? Hello? Naomi, it’s Detective Mike Bennett and Jimmy Doyle. You in here? You OK?” I said as we entered the apartment.

We passed by a galley kitchen and a sunken living room. Doyle and I exchanged a concerned glance when we spotted the closed back bedroom door.

I turned the door’s paint-flecked glass knob and pushed it open.

Naomi was sitting slumped over at a cluttered home office armoire. Immediately, we could see her open eyes, the blood splatter among the pencils and notebooks, her chunky black service Glock on the carpet between her feet.

Officer Naomi Chast was gone.

“No,” Doyle said, groaning as he started to walk over to her. “C’mon! This isn’t right. How is this possible?”

I grabbed his shoulder and pointed him toward the door.

“Go call it in, Doyle,” I said. “Call it in.”

CHAPTER
29

AS WE WAITED FOR
the local precinct detective to arrive, I went over to Naomi and knelt beside her.

“Mike, what are you doing, man? Aren’t we supposed to let the precinct DTs handle this? I can’t stand seeing her like that. I feel like it’s somehow my fault.”

“Doyle, get over here,” I said as I peered into Naomi’s face.

“No, man. I don’t want to,” Doyle said.

“Now,” I said.

“What?” he said as he finally arrived behind me.

“Look, her front tooth there. It’s chipped.”

“Uh-huh.”

“And here, look at her left hand. Her nails are neat and polished, but on her right hand, there are three broken fingernails.”

“What are you saying?”

I suddenly snapped my fingers as I glanced in the closet and under the bed.

“Doyle, listen. This is important. Where did Naomi wear her service weapon? On her right or left hip?” I said as I looked over the contents of her desk.

Doyle closed his eyes.

“Left,” he said.

“That’s what I thought,” I said. “She was left-handed, but her bullet wound here is more on the right.”

“You’re right,” Doyle said. “That doesn’t make any sense.”

“No, it doesn’t,” I said. “And also look at this computer cubby. It’s got everything, right? Except the computer. Where’s her computer? It’s not in the living room or the closet or under the bed. It’s not anywhere.”

“You’re right,” Doyle said. “What’s going on? You think she didn’t do this?”

“Hey, what are you doing in here?” said a voice from behind us.

“Glad you’re here,” I said, extending my hand to a bald, skinny, pale, thirtyish detective in a brown golf shirt. “I’m Mike Bennett. This is Jimmy Doyle.”

“Fred Evanson,” the cop said, shaking hands.

“Nice to meet you, Fred,” I said. “We worked with Naomi. Her stepmother said she wasn’t answering her phone since yesterday, so we decided to check in on her.”

Evanson frowned over at her.

“I’m sorry about your colleague. Damn, I hate to see that. So young. Real tragedy. This job can really chew you up,” Evanson said.

“That’s just the thing, Detective. I don’t know if it was the job. There’re signs of a struggle. Chipped fingernails, a chipped tooth. Also, her computer is missing and—”

“Whoa. What the—? What the hell are you doing here, Bennett?” said an older Hispanic cop, stepping in.

I restrained myself from rolling my eyes. I knew the cop, unfortunately. His name was Freddy Abreu, and he was known in the department as a creep and complete hack who for some unknown reason kept getting promoted. Actually, the reason was known. It was because he was a good friend and even better minion of Chief of Detectives Starkie.

“Get the hell out of here now, Bennett, before I have you written up for messing with my crime scene. Wait out in the hall. Now,” Abreu said.

CHAPTER
30

WE DID AS WE
were told. We sat out on the steps in the building hallway as more uniforms and more detectives and the crime scene unit arrived. I got the call I was expecting right after I sent Doyle to get us some breakfast.

“Bennett,” I said.

“One question, Bennett,” Starkie said. “Just one. Are you effing kidding me? Five seconds ago, I put you in charge of that unit, and now one of your guys is a stiff? What kind of manager are you? This officer meets her new boss, then goes home and blows her brains out?”

“That’s just the thing, Starkie. There are signs of a scuffle. I don’t think she committed suicide.”

“Already heard about your little conspiracy theory, Bennett. You’re thinking maybe she was shot from a black helicopter, huh? Or the president put her on the drone kill list? Or maybe it had a teensie weensie bit to do with the fact that several of her prior assignment evaluations rated her as excessively emotional?

“She was unstable, Bennett, and you pushed her right over the edge. So if I were you, I’d get my think box humming to deal with that, because don’t be surprised if that’s the media narrative coming your way. Because if you think I’m taking the heat on this from the mayor or the press or anyone else, you’re crazier than I thought!”

There was a tiny crackling plastic sound as I gripped my phone savagely in rage. I literally could not believe the bullshit I was hearing. A cop had just been killed, and already Starkie’s primary concern was how inconvenient it was for his ambitious career?

“That’s funny. I have a message for you, too, Starkie. Go—” I managed to get in before I heard his click.

“Who was that?” Doyle said as he came up the stairs carrying a cardboard tray of coffee.

“Nobody in particular,” I said, putting my phone carefully away as I motioned to Doyle to follow me down the stairs.

A hundred different emotions and thoughts swirled through me as I descended. I was revolted, of course, and sad and angry and keyed up, but mostly I was disappointed in myself.

Starkie was right about one thing. I’d majorly screwed up. I should never have allowed Naomi to go off and start an investigation on her own. I should have forced a partner on her.

No one had been watching her back, and that was definitely on me.

As I made the ground floor, I looked down at my vibrating phone and saw that Chief Starkie was trying to contact me again. Instead of answering, I turned off my phone as I motioned to Doyle to follow me toward the super’s ground-floor apartment.

“What are we doing, Mike? I thought the DT wanted us to wait to be questioned?”

“Change of plans, Doyle,” I said as I knocked on the super’s door.

“Oh, that poor girl,” said Meg Hambrecht as she answered, in jeans and a sweatshirt now. “I remember the day she moved in, how concerned she was about her movers hogging the elevator. Not wanting to inconvenience everybody. She seemed so together. Now something like this. It’s just—”

“Thanks, Ms. Hambrecht,” I said, interrupting, “but I noticed you have a security camera by the buzzer. We’d like to look at the footage.”

She shook her head rapidly.

“I’m sorry, but they’re installing a new system, and the building management fired the contractor in the middle of it. The whole thing has been out for a while now, three, four weeks. There is no footage.”

“Thanks for your time,” I said. “The other detectives are finishing up upstairs. They’ll probably be contacting you in a bit.”

“Mike, c’mon. What’s up?” said Doyle as we left the building.

“I’ll tell you what’s up, Doyle,” I said. “I worked homicide for five years. It’s more politically expedient for the department that her death be seen as a suicide. That’s why we have to investigate this on our own.”

“What about protocol?”

“Protocol and politics and especially Chief Starkie be damned, Doyle. Naomi was part of our team. She was one of us. If we don’t catch the people that did this to her, no one will.”

CHAPTER
31

WE RUSHED BACK TO
the Harlem office, and for the next half hour, Doyle and I tossed Naomi’s cubicle, looking for any notes she might have started on the cannibalism case.

It wasn’t looking too good. There weren’t any notebooks. The only paper in the place was a ream of copy paper for her printer. Everything we needed to know seemed to be on her password-protected computer.

“Hey, you know, Lopez knows computers,” Doyle said as we stood there staring at the Toshiba’s screen. “He, like, went to school and stuff before he got called for the cops. You didn’t hear it from me, but he even fixes them on the side.”

“You tell me this now?” I said. “Go get him.”

Lopez arrived along with Noah Robertson and Brooklyn Kale, who we’d informed on the way over. The gang looked pretty torn up about Naomi.

“We need you to do all you can, Arturo,” I said. “For Naomi.”

Lopez sat down in front of the computer and took a deep breath and began clicking away. After a second, he snapped a finger.

“Hey, we know Naomi had a Yahoo e-mail account through AT&T. The phone company will have her password on file. Somebody call them so we can at least look at her e-mails.”

Noah Robertson was doing just that when Lopez cried out.

“Forget it. I got it! Open sesame. I’m in!”

“Arty, my man,” Doyle said, giving Lopez an enthusiastic high five.

“What was it?” I said.

“Chast was a Red Sox fan,” Lopez said, rapidly clicking more keys and the mouse. “Used to drive me nuts. I mean, go join the Boston cops, why don’tcha? I remembered making fun of her at a softball game for wearing a Dustin Pedroia jersey, asking her if it was his actual jersey since the guy is such a shrimp. So I tried
DUSTIN
plus her birthday and wham-o. Easy beans.”

Lopez brought up a Word file entitled
Current Case
.

“Here it is, I think,” he said. “Looks like a cut-and-pasted note from her iPhone. She probably e-mailed it to herself. It looks like notes from an interview dated yesterday.”

Lopez read a little bit more and looked up at me.

“Mike, it looks like she’d already spoken to the complainant yesterday. Hudson Du Maurier the Third.”

Doyle looked at me from the other side of Lopez.

“Don’t tell me,” Doyle said. “It’s time we have a talk with Mr. The Third.”

CHAPTER
32

AS DOYLE AND I
went to Du Maurier’s address, I sent Brooklyn and Noah and Lopez on a scavenger hunt to see if they could find the sometimes sidewalk artist at one of his usual hangouts on the street.

Doyle and I had just parked in front of Du Maurier’s building on Lenox when my phone rang. It was Brooklyn Kale.

“We got him,” she said.

“Where?”

“Rucker Park.”

“Stay there. We’re on our way.”

We headed north. She didn’t have to tell me the address. Rucker Park, at 155th and Frederick Douglass, is probably the most famous public basketball court in the city. Started in the ’50s to give city kids something to do in the summer, the league and tournaments associated with the park had been a stepping-stone for such legends as Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Dr J.

There was quite a crowd when we pulled up, had to be a few hundred people in the aluminum stands. There was also an MC and even boom cameras and lights as two brightly uniformed three-on-three teams went at it. As I pulled behind Brooklyn’s double-parked cruiser, the crowd exploded in laughter and Bronx cheers as some lumbering six-five fifteen-year-old blew a slam dunk.

I sat in the back of the cruiser and shook Du Maurier’s hand. Du Maurier was a slim, neat, diminutive light-skinned black man in a dusty, threadbare tuxedo. His strange getup struck me as a cross between a magician and Charlie Chaplin’s Little Tramp. He nervously clutched a folding easel to his chest with both hands like it was an instrument he was about to play.

“You wanted to talk to me about something?” the seventy-something man said, rocking back and forth as he stared out at the crowd. He didn’t give me any eye contact. I wondered if he was maybe autistic.